App Review: Tiny Planet

With a glut of photo filtering and image editing apps filling the App Store, it can be refreshing to find an app that does something a little different. For me, that app is Tiny Planets. The app does the equivalent of applying a polar coordinate filter in Photoshop with the push of a button.

When using Tiny Planets, you will be asked to either choose an existing photo, or take a photo. While taking a photo can work, the app functions best when you import a 360 degree panorama from your camera roll. In the example below, I created a panorama using Photosynth, and then brought it into Tiny Planets. The user then has the option of either creating a Tiny Planet or a Rabbit Hole. With a Tiny Planet, the top portion of the image, typically the sky, is wrapped around the outer edges of the frame, making the rest of the image appear to be a planet surrounded by the sky. With a Rabbit Hole, the opposite occurs, and the top portion of the frame is wrapped in the center of the image.

Another tip for getting a seamless tiny planet is choosing a simple foreground. If you create a panorama while standing in the middle of a park, surrounded by grass, imperfections in the capture of the panorama due to parallax error are less noticeable. When shooting a Tiny Planet outdoors, it is also helpful to get a decent amount of sky up top. In the two lower examples below, I didn’t capture enough sky above the trees, and so they extend out of the frame.

Author

Daniel Sato

Daniel Sato is a visual journalist with The News Journal in Wilmington, Del. A graduate of San Jose State University, he previously worked as a staff photographer at the Des Moines Register. Find him on Twitter at @dsato and on Instagram at @danielsato.